The aim of the American Psychiatric Association Practice Guideline series is to improve patient care. Guidelines provide a comprehensive synthesis of all available information relevant to the clinical topic. Practice guidelines can be vehicles for educating psychiatrists, other medical and mental health professionals, and the general public about appropriate and inappropriate treatments. The series also will identify those areas in which critical information is lacking and in which research could be expected to improve clinical decisions. The Practice Guidelines are also designed to help those charged with overseeing the utilization and reimbursement of psychiatric services to develop more scientifically based and clinically sensitive criteria.
Current and comprehensive information concerning the assessment and treatment of suicidal persons and the prevention of suicidal behavior The eighth leading cause of death in the United States and the second leading cause among U.S. teens, suicide is unique in being self-inflicted and is, as such, often preventable. By assessing the risk of suicide accurately, providing effective treatment according to this risk, and implementing strategies against suicidal urges, mental health professionals can successfully guide their clients away from this senseless taking of life. Assessment, Treatment, and Prevention of Suicidal Behavior provides the most current and comprehensive source of information, guidelines, and case studies for working with clients at risk of suicide. It offers clinicians, counselors, and other mental health professionals a practical toolbox on three main areas of interest: Screening and Assessment covers empirically based assessment techniques and how they can define dimensions of vulnerability and measure the risk of self-destructive behavior. Authors discuss research on the use of each screening instrument, guidelines and suggestions for using the instrument in practice, and a case study illustrating its application. Intervention and Treatment compares several different approaches for structuring psychotherapy with suicidal clients. Each author covers a psychotherapy system, its application to suicidal clients, and a case study of its real-world use. Suicide and Violence explores the relationship between suicidal individuals and violence, covering suicide in specific contexts such as school violence, police confrontations, and terrorist violence. This section also includes a discussion of the increased risk of suicide in our more insecure and violent world, as well as how topromote coping styles for these new anxieties. While addressed mainly to psychologists, social workers, and other mental health professionals for use in serving their clients, as well as students of psychology, Assessment, Treatment, and Prevention of Suicidal Behavior is also an accessible and valuable resource for educators, school counselors, and others in related fields.
Helping the Suicidal Person provides a highly practical toolbox for mental health professionals. The book first covers the need for professionals to examine their own personal experiences and fears around suicide, moves into essential areas of risk assessment, safety planning, and treatment planning, and then provides a rich assortment of tips for reducing the person’s suicidal danger and rebuilding the wish to live. The techniques described in the book can be interspersed into any type of therapy, no matter what the professional’s theoretical orientation is and no matter whether it’s the client’s first, tenth, or one-hundredth session. Clinicians don’t need to read this book in any particular order, or even read all of it. Open the book to any page, and find a useful tip or technique that can be applied immediately.
Providing clinically useful information for mental health professionals encountering patients at risk, The American Psychiatric Publishing Textbook of Suicide Assessment and Management calls on the authority of 40 expert contributors reflecting a wide range of clinical and forensic experience.
The American Psychiatric Association (APA) is accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education to sponsor continuing medical education for physicians.
Every year, about 30,000 people die by suicide in the U.S., and some 650,000 receive emergency treatment after a suicide attempt. Often, those most at risk are the least able to access professional help. Reducing Suicide provides a blueprint for addressing this tragic and costly problem: how we can build an appropriate infrastructure, conduct needed research, and improve our ability to recognize suicide risk and effectively intervene. Rich in data, the book also strikes an intensely personal chord, featuring compelling quotes about people's experience with suicide. The book explores the factors that raise a person's risk of suicide: psychological and biological factors including substance abuse, the link between childhood trauma and later suicide, and the impact of family life, economic status, religion, and other social and cultural conditions. The authors review the effectiveness of existing interventions, including mental health practitioners' ability to assess suicide risk among patients. They present lessons learned from the Air Force suicide prevention program and other prevention initiatives. And they identify barriers to effective research and treatment. This new volume will be of special interest to policy makers, administrators, researchers, practitioners, and journalists working in the field of mental health.
Approximately 4 million U.S. service members took part in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Shortly after troops started returning from their deployments, some active-duty service members and veterans began experiencing mental health problems. Given the stressors associated with war, it is not surprising that some service members developed such mental health conditions as posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, and substance use disorder. Subsequent epidemiologic studies conducted on military and veteran populations that served in the operations in Afghanistan and Iraq provided scientific evidence that those who fought were in fact being diagnosed with mental illnesses and experiencing mental healthâ€"related outcomesâ€"in particular, suicideâ€"at a higher rate than the general population. This report provides a comprehensive assessment of the quality, capacity, and access to mental health care services for veterans who served in the Armed Forces in Operation Enduring Freedom/Operation Iraqi Freedom/Operation New Dawn. It includes an analysis of not only the quality and capacity of mental health care services within the Department of Veterans Affairs, but also barriers faced by patients in utilizing those services.
Why an entire volume on suicide in schizophrenia? It would appear that international literature already provides enough information in this field. Also, the daily growing number of papers on suicide among schizophrenic are certainly a more updated source of information may contribute to the reduction of deaths by suicide among these patients. Yet, as in the case of suicide as a whole, this progress of knowledge does not match with reduction of suicide rates, let alone reduction of suicide rates among people with schizophrenia. Maybe a summary, an overview that cannot be achieved with a simple Medline search may help those who are involved and those who should be involved in the prevention of self-killing of schizophrenic patients. This book, therefore, reports essays of some of the opinion leaders in the field with the aim to shed light to such overwhelming phenomenon.
This book explores suicide prevention perspectives from around the world, considering both professionals’ points of view as well as first-person accounts from suicidal individuals. Scholars around the globe have puzzled over what makes a person suicidal and what is in the minds of those individuals who die by suicide. Most often the focus is not on the motives for suicide, nor on the phenomenology of this act, but on what is found from small cohorts of suicidal individuals. This book offers a tentative synthesis of a complex phenomenon, and sheds some light on models of suicide that are less frequently encountered in the literature. Written by international experts, it makes a valuable contribution to the field of suicidology that appeals to a wide readership, from mental health professionals to researchers in suicidology and students.
